The Customer Is Always Wrong
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- £11.99
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- £11.99
Publisher Description
A young woman's art career begins to lift off as those around her succumb to addiction and alcoholism
The Customer is Always Wrong is the saga of a young na ve artist named Madge working in a restaurant of charming drunks, junkies, thieves, and creeps. Oakland in the late seventies is a cheap and quirky haven for eccentrics and Mimi Pond folds the tales of the fascinating sleaze-ball characters that surround young Madge into her workaday waitressing life. Outrageous and loving tributes and takedowns of her co-workers and satellites of the Imperial Cafe create a snapshot of a time in Madge's life where she encounters who she is, and who she is not.
Told in the same brash yet earnest style as her previous memoir Over Easy, Pond's storytelling gifts have never been stronger than in this epic, comedic, standalone graphic novel. Madge is right back at the Imperial with its great coffee and depraved cast, where things only get worse for her adopted greasy spoon family while her career as a cartoonist starts to take off.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pond's second autobiographical graphic novel picks up without pause where her first, the revelatory Over Easy, left off: with young Madge slinging hash at an Oakland diner packed with oddballs from the 1960s counterculture. Madge's career as a cartoonist starts to come together as the rest of her world seems to be falling apart: the guys she falls for are flakes, her coworkers are devolving from lovable potheads into genuinely troubled junkies, the local criminals get desperate and dangerous, and even her boss, the wise and poetic Lazlo, is increasingly adrift. As in Over Easy, Pond makes readers feel like regulars at the Imperial Caf , immersed in the ongoing soap opera behind the counter. Her loose, ink-washed art, honed during her years drawing for National Lampoon and The Village Voice, provides the perfect easy entry to the Imperial and a fond remembrance of a time past.
